Landscape, Innovation, and Nostalgia: The Manton Collection of British Art

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Edited by Jay A. Clarke
With essays by Tim Barringer, Ann Bermingham, Mary Broadway, David Blayney Brown, Antony Griffiths, Anne Lyles, Patrick Noon, Leslie Paisley, Amelia Rauser, and Sam Smiles; and with contributions by Sarah Hammond and Susannah Blair

Business leader and arts patron Sir Edwin A. G. Manton (1909–2005) and his wife Florence, Lady Manton, assembled an outstanding collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art. A gift to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute from the Manton Foundation in 2007, their collection features more than 300 oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, including works by John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Gainsborough, and William Blake.

In a series of wide-ranging essays, prominent scholars consider the major works and themes in the collection, relating them to larger issues within the field of British studies. Individual essays are devoted to Constable's oil sketches, cloud studies, and magisterial painting The Wheat Field; the growth of the watercolor tradition; print portfolios and narrative series; Thomas Rowlandson's satiric drawings; and Gainsborough's use of experimental materials as revealed through recent scientific analysis. The volume concludes with an illustrated checklist of the works in the collection.

Jay A. Clarke is Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

312 pages
447 color and 9 black-and-white illustrations
2012
ISBN 978-0-300-17966-8 (hardcover)